Air, Sea and Soil: MICRO-MACRO 2023, 2024

Ella BenAmi

“My works gather around the desire to organise and create a certain kind of distinctiveness that would allude to systems of codes or symbols that seem to exist within structures of reality that are alternate to those we apprehend in our everyday lives.”

Ella BenAmi started her artistic journey as a musician in Israel, performing with music groups from a very young age. She studied Asian Philosophy and Medicine between 1995 and 2000. She travelled extensively across India and the US where she studied Painting at the Corcoran College for Art and Design in Washington D.C. from 2003 to 2007. In 2016, she obtained an M.A. in Documentary Film Practice from Brunel University in London, where she resides and works.

Ella has participated in numerous exhibitions in the U.S, including in Bill Lowe Gallery (Atlanta), Seth Jason Beitler Gallery (Miami), Willow Street Gallery (Washington DC), 1ShanthiRoad Art Centre (Bangalore India), Ramat-Gan Museum of Contemporary Art (Israel), and more. Her works are in many private collections worldwide.

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Courtney Dookwah

Courtney Dookwah is a Canadian multidisciplinary artist, completing her BFA in Art Education at Concordia University, Montreal.

Her handmade paper, poetry, animations, paintings and performance work have been featured in group exhibitions nationally. Her practice explores unconventional material techniques, place-based pedagogies, and her relationship to memory, body and land. She has worked professionally in the museum on inclusive visitor experience projects, and today, she is developing her practice as an artist and educator, designing creative programs for multicultural community building, belonging and well-being.

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Melissa Joakim

Melissa Joakim is a light artist and composer working in Toronto, Canada. She has extensive experience in lighting and projection design for live theatre, dance performance and concerts. She is a Dora Mavor Moore Award recipient for Scenic Design and she is actively touring internationally. Her solo work primarily focuses on lighting and sound as waveforms that occupy space, fostering a holistic connection to self, others, and the Earth.

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Elspeth Penfold

Elspeth Penfold (Thread and Word) is a Bolivian/Argentinian multidisciplinary artist who has lived and worked in the UK since the 1970s. Elspeth has a passion for poetry and a wealth of experience as an artist working with weaving, walking, and writing. Her spinning and knotting work draws on the Incan history and technique of ‘Quipu’ (knot work), an ancient and nuanced form of communication used by indigenous communities. Elspeth’s commissions include Reclaiming the Narrative, at Turner Contemporary; Intertidal Calligraphy with Walk Create and The Museum of London Archeology; Port at Art Walk Porty, Edinburgh; and, Walking with Ghosts in Folkestone, a live art commission with the Imperial War Museum and The University of Kent.

As artist in residence with East Kent Mencap, Elspeth is currently working on Coasts in Mind. This is an intergenerational project with The Museum of London Archeology, supported by the National Heritage Lottery. The project empowers local communities to contribute to environmental policy through gathering oral histories of coastal change.

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Jennifer Riggs

I am a mixed media artist based in the San Francisco Bay Area of California, in the United States of America. In introducing myself and my work, I like to note that the name of the town where I live – El Sobrante – translates into English as the leftovers, or, remainders. It coincides with my artistic vision of recycling elements from both the natural and the human-made world. I like how cast-off leaves, branches, papers, and textiles can form layers of stories that shape moods and evoke beauty.

My art education has not been formal; though I have studied different disciplines here and there to improve my skills. I am a process- driven artist. I react to my environment, interpreting what I see and feel, choosing the elements and techniques of each piece and series as the place I am in dictates.

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Jane Sheppard

I was educated in Cambridge. Indigenous artefacts and folk art were my inspiration, guided by the wonderful museums. I decided to teach, gaining a BEd honours degree in 1989 (Art/Religious Studies specialising in Multicultural education).

My career began as ceramics technician for Bath College, then full-time lecturer (Art and Design) for nearly 15 years. I implemented, led and facilitated a range of courses across disciplines whilst developing my practice and exhibiting nationally, additionally becoming lead pastoral tutor for Fine Art.

I was awarded by South West Arts in 1997 and took a sabbatical year in 1998 to travel through Africa, returning as guest artist to Namibia with British Council funding

A parenting break led to being ordained as an Interfaith Minister in 2018, returning to the studio in 2019. I’m now a selected member of Craft Potters Association, developing my ceramics journey and teaching my skills.

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Philippa Stewart

Philippa Stewart (b. Wolverhampton, UK, 1990) is an artist, designer and educator who lives in Essex. Philippa received a BA in Fashion and Textiles from University West of England, Bristol, (2009 – 2012) and recently graduated from The Other MA (TOMA) 2019 -22 cohort

Philippa’s works and research explore the role survivalism has played in prehistory, nature and environment as a means of refuge combined with the importance of sharing skills, knowledge and material culture. 

Themes draw from the speculative era of Neolithic history where hunter-gatherers lived as one with nature and how this can be interpreted as a road map for our future, embellished with narratives around historical processes, objects and materials that formed humanity’s first technologies. Works are often tactile and labour intensive, using a combination of reclaimed and recycled materials reinvigorated using textile processes. 

Philippa’s projects manifest in the form of drawings, paintings, textiles, sculpture and video.

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Huan Wang

Huan Wang works across text, textiles, installation and film. She studies and lives in London as a cultural traveller, telling the connection between human and other existences in the modern urban space in the way of poetry and material narrative.

Huan Wang’s artistic practice conveys the sense of being as a human and explores the intersection of strength and fragility. While carefully and equally approaching the fragile fringes of the natural world, pointing to the neglected marginal and subaltern existence of human society is a common theme in her textile work. Her textile works are partly emotional fragments and partly document her natural experiences in urban spaces. It sometimes is a line of poetry, or a name, calling for a past that has not gone far.